There Was No Question
by MercuryMoon
Summary: He was a robot. She was a girl. From the beginning, their love was doomed. Based on VOiCE.


_A/N: A short piece for the Valentine's Day prompt for SyntheticTruth. This one was mostly inspired/based on Hatsune Miku's VOiCE and the cover sung by Kettaro and is somewhat based on the music video along with my own interpretations of it. A conversation I had with my friend about Bruno Mars' song, Grenade, also indirectly inspired this. _

**There Was No Question About It**

He was a robot.

She was a girl.

From their beginning, their love was doomed.

The two of them had grown up together. He was a robot designed to be a protector, ordered by her parents to take care of the girl. Before she was born, he was programmed to watch for irregular breathing, temperature changes, and if her diaper needed to be switched. He was also programmed to learn different kinds of martial arts and combat and came equipped with a scythe. While her parents hoped it would never come in handy, they still paid extra just in case it would one day be needed. The times they lived in after all were volatile, and they loved their unborn child. When she came wailing out of her mother's belly, she was handed over to him so that he would immediately become familiar with her and her needs. Their eyes met and a connection was forged.

He became her playmate, her constant companion. There was no question about it; they were inseparable. Her parents never had to worry because he was always there. They were out often because her father was a diplomat, and there was trouble with the neighboring country. As a result, the two of them were often left alone. She was child-like and would constantly pick flowers around her mansion. Sometimes they would be out for hours. Other times they would sit outside and he would watch her draw. He was her favorite subject, and he always enjoyed whatever scribbles, later sketches that she drew for him. As she grew older, she often talked of becoming an artist. Her most famous work would be a portrait of her dear robot friend, and he would travel everywhere with her.

Although he was a robot, the stirrings of love grew within him as he spent more and more time with her. At first, he had doubted himself. Theoretically it was not possible because his developers had never given him a soul, but there was no question about it; there was something planted in his heart that grew with each passing day. He wanted to feel electrified by her touch, but he could never feel her slender fingers on his steel wrist as she dragged him out of the house and into the gardens. He was aware of urges that he did not understand because it was not within the capacity of his programming. Sometimes he found himself watching her when it wasn't called for by the task assigned to him. She moved through life carefree like a butterfly, untouched by any troubles. She lighted on people and cheered them when they were unhappy. She was precious in a time when worry wrapped around her home and country like a thick, dark blanket, and as a result, people flocked to her. She never became as close to any of them as she was to him however. Always a chatterbox, she entertained them for hours, and when they left, she hugged them all spontaneously, but it was never like when she hugged him, where he could almost feel her heart beating against his chest. Sometimes it seemed like she returned his unspoken feelings, and those were the most painful times because his only problem was that he had never been given words and thus could not actually tell her how he felt.

It was a situation no program or wiring could have prepared him for, and when he sat by her bedside watching over her after she fell asleep, he often found himself constantly searching his internal software for any updates from the company. Nothing however ever came up.

The years went by like this.

Then one day, the trouble could no longer be contained and war broke out.

She was a teenager by then, almost a woman. The mansion was located at a key position in the war. Both sides wanted it for themselves. He was constantly called out by her father to destroy the robots sent to claim the house. Snowflakes of ash always fell on him after he demolished the invaders. The money her parents had paid for him was returning to them threefold, but that was never his concern. It was something he would have done even if he weren't asked to. This was the house the girl lived in; he would never let anyone else have it.

Despite his efforts, they kept coming. Her parents deemed it too dangerous to stay and fled. Because he was a robot, he was not taken with the family to the place they escaped to. It happened quickly. He could only watch as her mother pulled her away from her room and pushed her into the car. As the smoke spewed out of the exhaust pipe, it swirled around him in what he could only imagine as her final embrace. The burst of longing that followed was more than he could bear, and he turned away from her frantic farewell.

After she left, it was still again. The robots still came, but he dealt with them as he had dealt with them before. They were not important. Instead, he focused on his memories of her. Day by day, he would wander around the house remembering the moments they had spent together. He remembered the flowers that she liked to pick and watered them so that they would be alive when she returned. Any kind made her smile, but her favorite was the delicate aster, which blossomed right by the steps leading to the front door. When he missed her the most, he would hold a blossom to his nose and imagine himself inhaling the sweet scent.

The weeks went by like this.

One day, an entire arsenal greeted him. He intercepted them before they could even get to the front gate. For the first time, it was more than he could handle. He was nimble as always, precise with his deadly strokes, but there were too many of them. One ripped his left eye out, and that wrecked the wiring used to calculate his shots. His weapon was shot out of his hands. A tank blasted his leg and he fell to the ground, broken. As he strained to reach for his scythe, the remainder of his sight crackled in front of him.

They were preparing to storm the house and take it over.

No.

Everything he had fought to preserve, no.

Desperate, he popped his battery out and prepared to detonate it. It was a special battery that acted as a grenade. If he did it now, he could destroy all of them before they got to her house. The only problem was that it would take him down, too.

He paused.

If he died now, he would never see her, never protect her again. He would never find out if his programming could be upgraded. Was it worth it to sacrifice his life and future so that she would have a home to return to? A home rich with memories of her childhood and teenage years? He thought of the graceful turn of her head, the cheeky way she smiled at him when she knew she had done something wrong and knowing that he would never scold her. He would always be there for her, always be there to protect her from harm. Unlike a human, his theoretical heart was devoted completely to her; it would never waver, never be drawn to someone else.

Then again, he was a robot. What could he offer to her? He lived on his nuclear power; he could not age with her. From the time she had been an infant to the young woman she was now, he had not changed at all. When she became an old woman, he would still be ageless. Devoted to the end, he could only watch as she slipped away from him to death's final embrace. What kind of love could he give her? No matter how much he cared about her, he could never give her what she truly needed. She needed someone who could respond to her in all the ways he dreamed of but never could. She needed someone who could be there for her in a different sort of constant way. He was only a robot after all and could only do what he was programmed for. Love was not one of those things. He couldn't even feel her touch, even if he ripped away his steel casing and left only the wiring inside.

Even if she cared nothing for him, he wanted to preserve her home for her, the flowers that she loved, the table where she did all her sketches... any lingering memories of him. If she had ever had feelings for him, they would gradually fade away. He would become a mere childhood afterthought, a reminder of the war that tore her country apart. She would move on when she returned. She would love a man, a human man, someone she could have a family with and spend her life with. It was best that things went this way; he was not programmed to be selfish and he was not going to be selfish now.

There was no question about it; he detonated.


End file.
